


Waking to Bad Dreams

by justanothersong



Series: Djinn Dreams and Nightmares [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Supernatural, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Angst, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Not Canon Compliant, djinn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-22 23:37:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7458103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In an alternate universe where the Avengers team is forced to deal with the creatures and crises of the world of <i>Supernatural</i>, the Reader experiences the aftermath of a brush with a nightmare creature.</p><p>One-shot; might do follow-up if there's interest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking to Bad Dreams

They’d had you there for hours, holed up in a room typically used for interrogation. The door wasn’t locked but you knew there was someone standing guard. Your head was aching and your stomach churning. Your friends would pass in the room and pick at idle conversation, but all you could do was keep begging them to let you go home.

You had retreated from the steel table and chairs in the center of the room and sat down on the floor in the corner, the furthest away from the dim light that shone down from a fixture above the table. Your eyes were strangely sensitive to the glow, and the dimness of the corner helped to sooth the burn. 

Steve opened the door and you flinched at the sound. The Captain was still wearing his tactical uniform, his helmet lost somewhere along the way and his shield tucked away somewhere safe. He came over to where you sat and crouched on the floor, a deep look of concern shining in his blue eyes. He carried in a bottle of water, and held it out to you.

“How are you feeling?” he asked quietly.

“Like shit,” you replied honestly, and rubbed your eyes. “I want to go home.”

He gestured towards you with the water bottle again. “Here,” he said. “Drink some water. It’ll help you feel a little better.” Hit with a sudden wave of anger, you reached forward and slapped the bottle out of his hand.

“I don’t want any god damn water!” you shouted at him. “I just want to go home! Why are you keeping me here? What could I possibly have done?”

Steve frowned; his eyes carried a hint of sadness that worried you. “What do you remember?” he asked, voice as soft and gentle as he could make it.

You sighed heavily; you’d been over this before, several times already, with Steve, with Tony, with Bruce. You were still so angry but you were too tired to act on it.

“I told you,” you replied. “The last thing I remember, I was at home. Then I remember Clint carrying me out of some warehouse, the med bay, and then here. Why can’t I go home, Steve? I just want to go home. I’m so tired.”

He reached out and righted the bottle of water on the floor beside you, and sighed. “Please just drink some water, okay? You’re a little dehydrated. It’ll help you feel better, then we’ll talk some more.” 

He gave you a sad, lingering glance, and then left the room, closing the door behind him. You grabbed the bottle of water and tried to throw it at the door in anger, but your strength betrayed you, somehow too weak to send it even halfway there with your best throw.

You could hear voices outside the door and see shadows passing back and forth through the crack of light beneath it. Steve was still there, speaking to whomever he had left standing guard. You felt like a prisoner, held against your will by the very people you thought you could trust above all others.

Your senses had been dulled for a time but you could feel them wakening once again; your contributions to the team had always lain in your advanced senses, magnified hundreds of times beyond what any human with a non-mutagenic gene could comprehend. Your eyes still hurt and seemed dim, but you could pick up sounds of movement and conversation outside the door.

“How is she doing?” an all too familiar voice asked, and you drew in a sharp breath, but continued to listen.

“She still doesn’t understand what’s happened,” Steve responded to the speaker. “They tried to explain it in the med bay but she’s just refusing to believe it.”

The other voice sighed. “I’ve heard it can get bad,” he told Steve.

“It only took Clint a little while, Buck,” Steve pointed out. “This has been going on for hours.”

“They had her for a lot longer,” Bucky told him. “Takes hold a lot stronger, the longer they have them. We’re lucky we even found her alive.”

Steve sighed. “I just wish I could do something to help her,” he said, and you heard him begin to pace. “She’s so upset, Bucky. I’ve never seen her like this.”

“Maybe I should…?” Bucky spoke up, trailing off. There was a long pregnant pause before Steve spoke again.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” the Captain responded.

“Nothing else has worked,” Bucky pointed out. “Let me try.”

 

This time, when the door opened, you visibly brightened. You struggled to sit up a little straighter, still feeling weak from whatever ordeal it was that you couldn’t remember; they had wanted to keep you in the med bay but you had refused, causing far too much of a commotion to stay where other members of the team were still being treated.

“Bucky!” you called out, relief flooding you as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. You had felt better as soon as you had heard his voice, and now the figure of the handsome soldier, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve shirt as apparently hadn’t accompanied you and the others on whatever mission it was you had been on, made you feel more relaxed than you had in hours.

“Heya doll,” Bucky said softly, pausing to scoop up the water bottle from where you had thrown it. He came to crouch beside you much as Steve had done, the brothers-in-arms having adopted much of the same mannerisms over the years, and unscrewed the cap on the bottle before holding it out to you.

You let him press it to your lips and you took great greedy gulps of it, not realizing until that moment how dry your mouth felt and how thirsty you were. When you finished you turned your head away and he pulled the bottle back, screwing the cap back on before setting on the floor beside you. You wiped your mouth with the back of your hand and sighed.

“Bucky, what’s going on? Why won’t they let us go home?” you asked, voice wavering as tears threatened to spill over. 

He reached up and brushed your hair away from your face, pausing to gently run his fingers along your cheekbone. You preened at the attention, leaned into his touch. You had been asking for Bucky about as much as you had been asking to go home, and had been constantly denied. You were glad for his presence now, even if he was being held there with you.

“You were out on a call, do you remember?” he told you softly. “It went bad. Took a couple days to find you for an extraction.”

You frowned, puzzled; you didn’t remember any of it.

“No,” you said slowly, shaking your head. “Bucky, I’d remember that. I quit. _We_ quit, years ago.”

“No, darlin’,” Bucky told you. “We’re still on the job, you and me both. Look at what you’re wearing. That’s your uniform, ain’t it? You were working with Steve and Clint, cos Nat’s got some busted ribs from that wendigo and Tony took a crush-wound to his thigh from a wolf bite that couldn’t get through his suit.”

You frowned, glancing down and confirming his words. You hadn’t even noticed that you were wearing your black fitted tactical gear, or at least some of it; your weapons were gone and there were shreds and gashes in the fabric, your wrists bearing evidence of binding and deep track marks on your right arm.

“What happened to me…?” you asked, more to yourself than to Bucky.

“Your target knew you were onto it. Teamed up with a banshee, we think. Sharin’ the spoils and whatnot. Your senses… the scream took you down, babydoll,” he explained. “They snatched you up and booked before either Steve or Clint could find you. Took longer than we hoped to track you down.”

You shook your head. “I don’t understand,” you told him. “Why don’t I remember? Is that why they won’t let us go home, because I don’t remember?”

Bucky sighed out your name, his expression pained. There was such sorrow and sympathy in his pale blue eyes that you trembled at the sight of it, afraid of what me might say.

“You are home,” he told you. “We’re in Tony’s Tower. You live here, remember? Same floor as Natasha.”

You laughed, low and frightened. “I used to live here,” you corrected. “We used to live here. But we wanted a house, a real house away from all of this.” 

Bucky took your face in his hands and kissed your forehead. He had known this would be difficult; he hadn’t expected it would hurt him as much as it seemed to hurt you. He hoped the affection he showed would help temper the blow.

“We never moved out, babydoll,” he told you with a sigh. “None of what you been sayin’ is real. It was a djinn. You remember djinns, don’t you? They put stuff in your head, make you think it’s the real deal, all the while bleeding you dry.”

You paled at the thought, struck with the horror of what he was saying. “No!” you said in a harsh whisper. “No, Bucky, please… no, it’s not true!”

He looked broken, squeezing his eyes shut even as he tried to soothe you. “We never moved out of the Tower. We both live here, we both still work here. We… darlin’, we were never married. We were never even a couple. All that stuff, the house and the dog and all of it, the djinn put that in your head. It ain’t real. It never was.”

You were crying now. There was no way it could be true. You loved Bucky, and he loved you. You remembered it all so clearly: the little yellow house in the suburbs, the puppy he’d brought you for your first anniversary. Your wedding day, the little white dress you wore to the courthouse. Steve had stood as best man, Bruce your ‘Man of Honor’.

You remembered your first kiss after a rough mission, glad to be alive, glad to be together. You remembered making love and waking up tangled in his arms; you remembered the day he asked you to run away with him, run away from all of this danger, to be safe and together, for always.

It was all so clear in your mind. It couldn’t be true, what he was saying.

“Bucky, why are you saying these things? Please, stop. Please stop lying to me,” you said frantically, tears now flowing freely. You had fallen in love with Bucky so quickly, so easily once he had taken up residence in the Tower. You had always been so afraid to act on it, but when you finally did, you had been so happy and free, feeling light as air. You couldn’t imagine why he was hurting you like this.

He reached up with both hands to hold your face, dropping a kiss to your temple. “It’s going to be okay,” he told you. “You just need a little time. I promise, it’ll be okay.”

You tried to ignore it, the soft click-click-whir you heard as he moved his arm. You couldn’t understand why he was wearing a glove, only on one hand, while he touched you. You found yourself terrified to ask, even as your eyes drifted to the gloved hand still touching your face.

Realization seemed to dawn on his face. “Will this do it?” he asked quietly. He reached his unclothed hand to the glove, tugging gently on the fingertips.

“No,” you told him, shaking your head, eyes still glued to his action. “Please, Bucky, no.”

When the glove was removed and the metal of his prosthetic arm revealed, you bit back a wail. In your dreams, he was whole; because you knew that the arm represented to Bucky all of the horrors he had committed under Hydra’s control. In your fantasies, you took that pain away from him, giving him his flesh and bone back. 

You realized all he had said was true.

“Oh, god, no,” you muttered, and quickly pushed out of Bucky’s reach, half-crawling away to vomit in a wastebasket. As you choked on the rush of water and bile, Bucky tried to soothe you, moving to your side to rub his hand at the small of your back.

“It’s okay,” he tried to comfort you. “It was a dream. You were poisoned by the djinn venom, but it’s been mostly flushed out of your system. You’ll feel better in a couple days.”

You just shook your head, even as you heaved. Everyone knew your most secret fantasies; how could you ever face any of them again?


End file.
